Dragon Age: The Last Court Is Failbetter’s BioWare Project

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We’ve been speculating about Failbetter Games’ collaboration with BioWare since February, so it’s a relief to finally discover that it’s Dragon Age: The Last Court. It’s a text-driven project set just before the events of BioWare’s soon-to-be-released Dragon Age: Inquisition.

You play as the ruler of a place called Serault: “an eccentric fiefdom at the farthest ends of Orlais. As the Huntress or the Scholar you’ll guide your realm through the most crucial period in its history. Will its ancient Shame be forgiven? Or will Serault fall into obscurity?”

The game sounds incredibly Failbetter-y (Adam, get back from holiday so I can discuss this with you immediately!). I mean potential threats include “the nameless ancient things that slither in its deep woods” for goodness sake. There is a Purveyor of Teas and an Acerbic Dowager.

Familiar faces from other Dragon Age games are also promised but – confession time – I haven’t actually played any of the Dragon Age games so I cannot make predictions on this front. Origins is sitting on my harddrive waiting for me to start it this very evening though so perhaps we should reconvene in however many millionty hours DA and its DLC will take up. You know. After you’ve all played The Last Court and talked about it without me.

8 Comments

Hmm. While more Failbetter is very much a good thing, and I certainly enjoy Dragon Age, I can’t help but wish that the collaboration between FB and Bioware had been something original. Still, I’ll probably end up playing the heck out of this, simply for more of the lovely, lovely words that Failbetter produce.

Their smaller projects have tended to be both more and less grindy, in different ways, than Fallen London. Less grindy in that they are small, specifically scoped projects with no need to delay your progression while they work on more content. More grindy in that they are small projects with significantly fewer storylets so you’re likely to see a lot of them repeatedly.

I loved playing Fallen London and I played it quite a lot indeed reaching many if not most content walls, but it only reinforced my hatred of such browser actiony-refreshy format. I hope they find better game designs to put their words into and that is why I really hope Sunless Sea does not suck when it, ahem, ships.

I am on the record in multiple places that I am looking forward to this more than Dragon Age 3. Failbetter have consistently excelled in their field, whereas Bioware’s made some serious missteps in recent years, particularly with Dragon Age II, but also (in my book, if apparently not most of the critical establishment) Mass Effect 2 and (while an overall improvement) some aspects of Mass Effect 3, most notably the ending. I’ll still -get- Dragon Age 3, and probably enjoy it (hell, I enjoyed some things about Dragon Age II, and that’s as big a trainwreck as I think Bioware’s -ever- delivered), but I don’t expect them to recapture what I loved about the first games in either the Dragon Age or Mass Effect franchises ever again, much less figure out what was so great about the games before those.

I feel like this is something they need to get right or as a company they’ll simply lose credibility. Maybe I’m old school but I like the game play and customization of the first dragon age over the more recent look. Treat it like Mass Effect and everything just ends up weird…